Hi5 has a large audience in Spanish-speaking markets, Thailand, Romania, Portugal, and many other countries. How much more popular would your application be if it supported Spanish, Thai, Romanian, Portuguese and 50 other languages?
To simplify the translation process for applications, hi5 has connected its OpenSocial development platform to its community-based translation system. For the past six months hi5 has been building teams and language tools to translate the hi5 website into 25+ new languages; now, that same community and toolset is available to OpenSocial developers to translate the applications.
Translations are performed only by users of the application who are members of the hi5 translation team for that language. In addition, developers have complete control over all translations translated text within the system, and may delegate this editorial responsibility to specific translators or reviewers.
Translators have access to the hi5 language tools on the application canvas page. Translations take place in context, directly adjacent to the functioning application.
Developers can preview the translations, perform any required edits, and then publish, making the translation available to all hi5 members. Furthermore, as a developer, you can download the translated text for deployment in any OpenSocial compliant container.
Getting Started
The translation process begins by internationalizing (i18n) the application. The OpenSocial specification is i18n-ready and hi5 provides Internationalization guidelines to help you with this step.
Once the application is internationalized, developers will Reload the application and select to Receive hi5 translations. Developers need to set the application's Default Locale to indicate the language used in the default message bundle. This loads the application's text into the translation system and makes it available to the translators who use the application.
Although the translation teams are most accustomed to translating from English to other languages, as is the case on the hi5 website, the translation tool for applications supports translation from any source language as defined in the hi5 system. This permits maximum flexibility in development and translation.
A new tab has been added to the Development Console, showing the translators' progress. As translations become approved by the community, those languages will appear atop the list with messages indicating New Translations available for download. Exporting the translated message bundle, updating the app xml and reloading the app publishes the new translations.
Additional Resources
For more information on the translation system and processes now available to you, please refer to the following documents:
- Developer Guidelines for Translating hi5 Applications - provides an overview of the translation program for OpenSocial applications.
- Linguist Guidelines for hi5 Applications - explains the role of the hi5 Linguist in hi5's Volunteer Translation program.
- Linguist Instructions for Translating hi5 Applications - provides how-to instructions for Linguists assigned to a hi5 application.
- hi5's Internationalization Guidelines - the internationalization section of the hi5 Developer wiki.
- OpenSocial Specificiations - Google's OpenSocial home page.
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